The present invention relates to a pizza oven hood.
In the past, pizza enthusiasts have generally found it necessary to leave their homes or places of work and travel to a pizza restaurant if they wanted a high quality fresh baked pizza. Although other methods of obtaining a pizza, such as purchasing a frozen pizza, cooking a fresh pizza from scratch or ordering a pizza for delivery, have been available for some time, these alternatives to visiting a restaurant are not without drawbacks. For example, frozen pizzas tend not to have the same high quality flavor and consistency as fresh pizzas, and of course, it is often inconvenient to bake a pizza from scratch. Further, ordering a pizza for delivery often results in disappointment for the pizza enthusiast. The delivered pizza is often lukewarm and soggy, and it may have lost flavor en route to the consumer.
Although the pizza industry has attempted to provide convenient delivery service to consumers, the problems attendant to traditional delivery systems may have limited the market. For example, it has been difficult or impossible to guarantee the quality of delivered pizzas because of the lack of control over the pizzas once they leave the restaurant.
Until recently, the concept of preparing and cooking pizza in a vehicle en route to delivery destination had not been seriously considered, perhaps at least in part because the difficulties presented by ventilating a pizza oven discouraged this approach. However, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 599,497 entitled Pizza Preparation and Delivery System and assigned to the assignee of the present invention, discloses a pizza delivery system in which a pizza can be prepared and cooked in a moving vehicle en route to a delivery destination.
In the past, pizzas have been cooked in restaurants or in residential dwellings, where ventilation could be provided by a variety of means. But traditional hood systems in a moving vehicle are not suitable for ventilating a pizza preparation and delivery vehicle for a variety of reasons.
One problem is attributed to space limitations. A pizza preparation and delivery vehicle should be as compact as possible, in order that energy costs can be maintained at reasonable levels. Nevertheless, space is required for preparing the pizzas, as well as for storing the pizza shells and the pizza topping ingredients. Thus, a compact pizza preparation and delivery vehicle lacks space for the ductwork normally associated with oven hoods.
Another problem relates to the external environment of the pizza preparation and delivery vehicle. Although traditional hoods have exhausting means in the roof or uppermost part of the hood, considerations of weather, bridge clearances and aesthetics militate against exhausting hood vapors through the top of the pizza preparation and delivery vehicle.
Yet another problem relates to the cost of operating the hood and conditioning the pizza preparation and delivery vehicle. It is particularly important in the vehicle to conserve conditioned air, because air conditioning places a large electrical load on the system. It would be extremely expensive to circulate all the conditioned air of the vehicle in order to obtain proper ventilation for the pizza oven therein.